


Somebody's Kin

by pinebluffvariant



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-I Want to Believe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 14:56:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4750520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinebluffvariant/pseuds/pinebluffvariant





	Somebody's Kin

Stranger things had happened in his life, but never in a million years did Mulder ever imagine that one day, Maggie Scully would be sitting across from him at his kitchen table, pushing a plate of tea cookies towards him, saying “You’re looking thin, Fox, you need to eat”. But there they were.

It was a cheerful late-March morning. Mulder came to slowly on the sun-warmed couch, stared blearily into space before he realized that the phone was ringing. The landline. Nobody ever called on the landline. Over the years he had conditioned himself to never answer it, anyway, since he was never sure whether Scully’s colleagues even knew that he existed. Among all the things the two of them had never talked about, that was the least painful to think about. But he was free now. He’d been free for going on a month. But old habits die hard.

He staggered to the phone, picked up the receiver. “Hello?” He couldn’t remember the last time he and Maggie had had an actual conversation. The most they usually spoke was a ‘Merry Christmas’ here and a ‘Happy Easter’ there, Scully holding out the receiver to him mid-chat and nodding vigorously. She said she was on her way down to Norfolk for a Navy event, and could she stop by on her way?

“S- Dana won’t be home tonight, she’s working a double shift,” he said. Why did he feel like he was giving her an out? Why did he feel like he was giving himself an out? He didn’t talk to people much. It was unnerving.

“That’s perfectly fine. We can make lunch and chat.“

She hung up and arrived, as promised, three hours later. Maggie Scully, the woman whose shaking voice had once entrusted Scully’s life to him, and who had never, treated him unkindly, stood on his front stoop with a small smile and greying hair. Her daughters’ spirits fluttered across the older woman’s features.

“Hello, Fox, it’s good to see you,” she said, and he had to compose himself before opening the screen door and hugging her. He hoped she couldn’t tell how much energy the small gesture sucked out of him. But it was nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a bit of sugar and caffeine.

Inside, Mulder busied himself for a few minutes, fussing with tea, serving it to Maggie out of an actual teapot. “This is delicious, Fox,” Maggie’s kind voice praised. “Your time in England obviously paid off.” They sat for a few minutes, chatting about nothing. The paint color in the house - it was a bad paint job and had come with the house, but Mulder pretended it had been their idea - the peace and quiet of their property, Mulder’s health, Maggie’s Navy wife girlfriends having a reunion in Norfolk. The normalcy of it all made Mulder wary, but he could feel his body absorbing every last ounce of another human being’s words, of the new energy in the kitchen, of feeling tethered to somebody from a past he’d tried in vain to let go.

Maggie drained her tea and “Fox, can you show me your vacation photos? Dana told me about your Bahamas trip and I’m just dying to see what you got up to.”

Mulder went upstairs to their bedroom, opened Scully’s laptop, made sure that no compromising viewing material that mature and committed couples enjoy in the privacy of their bedroom had been left on the screen, and got ready to, for the very first time, tell someone the story of a couples’ vacation he (of all people) had been on.

He gave her the clean version of events. “Dana and I had never really talked about how much we both love the sea,” he found himself explaining wistfully, “but we had this little bungalow by the beach and all of a sudden we just could not stay out of the water. See, the sand goes on forever. It’s beautiful, especially at night. Oh, here’s one where Dana’s mad at me. Look, she came running and these gulls were chasing after her and she was yelling ‘shut up, Mulder! Shut up!’ She was adorable!” Mulder laughed heartily at the memory. Incredible, incredible the pieces of a person you carry within you. 

Maggie’s cell phone rang. Mulder refilled their teacups and went to the fridge to survey the dinner options. It was supposed to be just him tonight. He had planned put on his sweats and do pushups in front of Lost. “Dana, honey!” Maggie exclaimed. “No, I’m not at home. I’m here in your kitchen with Fox, honey. Just wanted to stop by on my way down to see Sharon and Elizabeth. They do send their regards. I will, yes I will Dana. Make sure you eat something.” She hung up.

“Dana sounds happy. She told me to give you step-by-step instructions for dinner. I’ll have to have a talk with her sometime about not condescending to her husband.”

Mulder’s eyes widened. “We’re no-“

Maggie shook her head. “You are. May the church forgive me for saying this, but you are.”

She asked to be taken for a walk. That was definitely something he could do. He knew the property by heart, having run the perimeter five times a week for the past several years. At first he’d guessed this was home now, and then he’d known.

They put on rubber boots - a surprisingly chic pair of Scully’s child-sized galoshes for Maggie - and set off. Behind the house a path led into the woods, and they sauntered easily along, through thickets and clearings and places where the birches were beginning to bud, straining toward the sun. A deer was nosing around for anything green in the cold ground, and it startled and dashed away upon hearing their voices.

“Maggie, you said back there- I… I have my mother’s ring.” This was a secret. In 2000, he’d pocketed it at his mother’s wake, having taken nothing else she left him. In 2005, he’d taken off for a couple of days, found the bank in North Carolina where a William S. Hale kept a safe deposit box, and brought the contents back with him in a padded envelope. The ring hid, now, in a box of push pins in his office. He’d never shown it to her.

“Like I said, Fox, I know it’s unconventional but we are family, you and I.” Maggie smiled at him, and the sun cast shadows on her face. “Now, if you want to do something with it, whenever that may be, you have my blessing.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Maggie rested her hand in the crook of his arm, and they made their way back to the house to start on a casserole. They ate, he tidied while she drank another cup of tea, she got in her car, and left. “Give Dana a kiss for me,” she said, getting on her tip toes to hug him warmly.

He was alone again, but wasn’t. Now he was somebody’s kin.


End file.
